I teach at Lehigh University in eastern Pennsylvania. I work on British colonialism, modernism, postcolonial/global literature, and the digital humanities.

Wednesday, October 31, 2007

Diversity in the Indian Constitution (Guha Chapter 6)

[Part of an ongoing series on Ramachandra Guha's India After Gandhi. Last week's entry can be found here. Next week we will skip a chapter, and go directly to Chapter 8, "Home and the World," which explains how India evolved its "non-aligned" status.]

I've actually written a longish post on the idea of "secularism" in the Indian constitution in the past, but of course there's more to say. The entire proceedings (more than 1000 pages of text!) of the Constituent Assembly have been posted online by the Indian Parliament here. Guha's account comes out of reading through those proceedings, and is also deeply influenced by Granville Austin's classic book, The Indian Constitution: Cornerstone of a Nation, which is still, as I understand it, the definitive book on the subject.

As many readers may be aware, the Indian Constitution was worked out over the course of three years (1946-1949), by a Constituent Assembly that contained 300 members, including representation by religious minorities, members of marginal groups (i.e., Adivasis), as well as a small but vocal group of women.

Three of the profound disagreements that the members of the Assembly had to resolve included: 1) the proper role of Gandhian philosophy in defining the new nation, 2) the question of "reservations" for Dalits and Tribals (Scheduled Castes and Tribes), and 3) the status of Indian languages, and the idea of an "official" language.

1. Panchayats.

Let's start with the question of the Gandhian idea of village panchayats, which was essentially rejected by the Constituent Assembly in favor of a strong, modern, centralized government. The lead voice in rejecting the Panchayat system was of course the Dalit lawyer and political figure B.R. Ambedkar. Here is Guha:

Some people advocated a 'Gandian constitution,' based on a revived panchayat raj system, with the village as the basic unit of politics and governance. This was sharply attacked by B.R. Ambedkar, who held that 'these village republics have been the ruination of India.' Ambedkar was 'surprised that those who condemn Provincialism and communalism should come forward as champions of the village. What is the village but a sink of localism, a den of ignorance, narrow-mindedness and communalism?'

These remarks provoked outrage in some quarters. The socialist H.V. Kamath dismissed Ambedkar's attitude as 'typical of the urban highbrow.' The peasant leader N.G. Ranga said that Ambedkar's comments showed his ignorance of Indian history. 'All the democratic traditions of our country [have] been lost on him. If he had only known the achievements of the village panchayats in Southern India over a period of a millenium, he would not have said those things.' However, the feisty female member of the United Provinces, Begum Aizaz Rasul, 'entirely agreed' with Amdedkar. As she saw it, the 'modern tendency is towards the rights of the citizen as against any corporate body and village panchayats can be very autocratic.' (119)

(Incidentally, the entire text of Ambedkar's speech is at the Parliament of India website, here. Go check it out -- it's a fascinating document.)

I know that there are still neo-Gandhian thinkers out there who value highly decentralized government as a way of preventing tyranny. And it has to be admitted since independence, the Indian "Centre" has often overstepped its bounds, culminating perhaps in Indira Gandhi's 1975 "Emergency" (many other instances could be mentioned).

But the fact that the most prominent Dalit representative and one of the most prominent women in the Assembly saw the "village" as a site of backwardness and repression, not liberation, cannot simply be ignored. They saw the move to centralization -- and a focus on individual, rather than group or "corporate" rights -- as a necessary step towards nudging Indian society towards caste and gender equality.

In my view, it's a remarkable thing that the Indian Constitution essentially rejected Gandhian thinking, especially given how powerful Gandhi's ideas and political methods had been in achieving the state of independence that led to the writing of this Constitution to begin with. But it may be that Gandhi had too much faith that people were going to be good to one another, and even in 1948 itself some members of the Assembly were aware that something stronger than mere idealism would be required to guarantee the rights of the disenfranchised.

2. Reservations.

Reservations is a huge topic, one that I can't possibly deal with in a very substantive way right now (see this Wikipedia page for a brief tutorial). Suffice it to say that when the Constitution was ratified in 1950, it contained reservations for Scheduled Caste (SC) and Tribe (ST) groups in Parliament and State Assemblies, but not for what were known as "Other Backward Castes" (OBCs), though reservations for those groups would be recommended later. (And this latter question became a hot issue yet again in 2006, though as far as I know the recommendation for national OBC reservations in Indian higher education has not yet been implemented.)

Guha's brief account of the debate over this question focuses on an Adivasi (tribal) political figure I hadn't heard of, Jaipal Singh from Chotanagpur in the southern part of Bihar. Jaipal Singh had been sent by missionaries to study at Oxford, where he became a star at field hockey, and indeed, won a gold medal in the sport in 1928. In the Constituent Assembly, he made the following remarkable speech:

As a jungli, as an Adibasi, I am not expected to understand the legal intricacies of the Resolution. But my common sense tells me that every one of us should march in that road to freedom and fight together. Sir, if there is any group of Indian people that has been shabbily treated it is my people. They have been disgracefully treated, neglected for the last 6000 years. The history of the Indus Velley civilization, a child of which I am, shows quite clearly that it is the newcomers--most of you here are intruders as far as I am concerned--it is the newcomers who have driven away my people from the Indus Valley to the jungle fastness. . . . The whole history of my people is one of continuous exploitation and dispossession by the non-aboriginals of India punctuated by rebellions and disorder, and yet I take Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru at his word. I take you all at your word that now we are going to start a new chapter, a new chapter in of independent India where there is equality of opportunity, where no one would be neglected.

You can see the anger and the pain -- but also the impressive willingnes to turn a new page, and cooperate fully in an "independent India where there is equality of opportunity."

3. "Hindi imperialism."

Finally, one of the most divisive questions of all was the status of English vis a vis Indian languages. At the moment of independence, it's not surprising that a large number of participants in the Constituent Assembly found it galling that the proceedings were occurring largely in English, and some were insistent that the Indian constitution be "primarily" written in Hindi. There was also a strong movement to make Hindi India's national language, which was of course rejected.

The simple truth is that there is no one, universal Indian language, and the people who were insisting that Hindi should be become that language had to give way, or risk provoking separatist sentiments from South Indians. Guha quotes one particular figure, T.T. Krishnamachari of Madras, along those line:

We disliked the English language in the past. I disliked it because I was forced to learn Shakespeare and Milton, for which I had no taste at all. . . . [I]f we are going to be compelled to learn Hindi . . . I would perhaps not be able to do it because of my age, and perhaps I would not be willing to do it because of the amount of constraint you put on me. . . . This kind of intolerance makes us fear that the strong Centre which we need, a strong Centre which is necessary will mean the enslavement of people who do not speak the language of the Centre. I would, Sir, convey a warning on behalf of people of the South for the reason that there are already elements in South India who want separation. . . , and my honorable friends in U.P. do not help us in any way by flogging their idea [of] 'Hindi Imperialism' to the maximum extent possible. Sir, it is up to my friends in U.P. to have a whole India; it is up to them to have a Hindi-India. The choice is theirs. (131)

What's interesting about this for me is the way it already shows the contradictions in the desire to have a strongly centralized government -- it can't be done easily in a country with such strong regional language traditions.

For more on how "official language" questions in India have evolved since the writing of the Constitution, see this Wikipedia entry.

People have lots of complaints about the Indian Constitution -- it's ridiculously long, for one thing, and punted on several highly controversial questions (one of them being language, the other being the "Uniform Civil Code"). People who dislike caste reservations also often cite the Constituent Assembly as in effect the starting point for a system they feel has spiraled out of control.

But what I think is impressive about this process is the strong attempt made to include as many of India's diverse voices as possible, without sacrificing a vision of effective centralized government. By contrast, the U.S. Constitution may be clearer and simpler, but it was written exclusively by property-holding white men who all spoke a single language (early America was actually much more linguistically diverse than people think). Native Americans were not invited, though in fact this was their land before the colonists came. Women were not invited, nor were African Americans. Despite its flaws, India's Constitution did a much better job at defining the new nation inclusively than America's did.

4 comments:

What's in a name / Jaipal Singh : I had always assumed that, outside of the Punjab, the name Singh implied that the owner was of the Kshatria class. One Internet source says that Jaipal Singh was born into the royal family of Khooty state in what is now Jharkhand. Another source says that he was a Munda tribesman (whatever that means or implies). JS was "was one of the members of the Scheduled Areas and Scheduled Tribes Commission" -- from "The Scheduled Tribes of India", by G.S.Ghurye (Ref.1). This work makes several mentions of JS speaking of his Adibasi constituents as "my own folk". That last set of quotation marks belongs to Mr. Ghurye, and reflects the skepticism I myself have about JS representing Adibasi interests and not his own. For JS to claim to be Adibasi / jungli (indigenous) himself and then profess to be a child of the Indus Valley civilization (Aryan) seems disingenuous. I suspect that JS and his Jharkhand party were more about power grabbing than dedication to Adibasi welfare. The primary goal of the Jharkhand Party -- secession from Bihar --took a half century to accomplish; I hope the Adibasis are the better for it.

Language : The Wikipedia reference is informative, but not quite enough. I wonder if Guha mentions "the linguistic reorganization of states". This was a process that continued well into the 60s -- I recall violent demonstrations and bombings in 1966 because of a border dispute between Maharashtra and Karnataka. That particular dispute was eventually resolved, but now the border people of Karnataka are agitating loudly against neglect by the state government! Another fallout from this has been the deterioration of language. Elders in my family complain that Kannada is being degraded by the use of Marathi and Konkani words, and by the acceptance, in writing, of ungrammatical and colloquial language to the detriment of the formal. Hindi imperialism has lost its bite over the years, mostly due to the universal appeal of Hindi movies and song, and also because of the free movement of people away from their "home states". A more recent phenomenon I see is the inability of anyone to speak Hindi without frequent resort to English words -- Amitabh Bacchan seems to be the exception that proves the rule. I learned recently that scripts for Hindi movies are now usually written in English first and then translated into Hindi. The true victim of Hindi imperialism, I fear, is the language itself and the way it is spoken. Hindi imperialism didn't matter much to South Indians migrating North to work; it was natural enough to learn the language of the marketplace. Similarly, on a lesser scale, North Indians of a few generations ago who migrated South (mostly Marwaris) integrated well to the point of learning the language. Judging from the gripes and mutterings of the locals, however, recent generations of North Indians who move South apparently have not made the same effort. One hopes that this will not lead to a South Indian version of the Shiv Sena.

I'm no scholar of the Indian Constitution but it does seem like an amazing document to me. In theory, India seems like a place ungovernable by democratic means. So, the Constituent Assembly deserves a lot of credit for making fifty-plus years.

These are great posts. I just wish I had more time to think about them.

Narayan's comments about the possibility of another parochial movement in South against Hindi. We had a similar thing in 60s by Tamils. Though it is not a totally unfounded fear, there is one major difference now. We have a very robust vernacular media printed, electronic and cinema that evolved post-independence. I don't think hindi can penetrate these powerful local waves and influence men on the street. The other point about native tongues being polluted by words from other languages. Well which language is completely isolated from this phenomenon? perhaps thats the beauty of language, it constantly keeps borrowing words from others.

Links, Selected Posts

Amardeep Singh, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh UniversityOn Twitter

My book, Diaspora Vérité: The Films of Mira Nair, published by the University Press of Mississippi in 2018, is now available on Amazon.

I have been working on several digital projects in Scalar. All are in progress as of January 2019.
One is digital archive I am calling "The Kiplings and India." Working with a team of graduate research assistants, we have been building the site in Scalar here. Feedback welcome; it's a work in progress.

I have also been working on a Digital Collection called "Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1912-1922)" This project began as a collaborative class project called "Harlem Echoes," a digital edition of Claude McKay's "Harlem Shadows." The new version of the project is much-expanded, including McKay's early Jamaican poetry as well as his uncollected political poetry from magazines like The Liberator and Workers Dreadnought.

I also put together a digital edition of Jean Toomer's Cane, taking advantage of the fact that that work is now in the public domain. That project can be found here.